> On Wed, Mar 21, 2001 at 08:48:54PM -0300, Rik van Riel wrote:> > On Wed, 21 Mar 2001, Patrick O'Rourke wrote:> > > > Since the system will panic if the init process is chosen by> > > the OOM killer, the following patch prevents select_bad_process()> > > from picking init.> > There is a dozen other processes that must not be killed.> Init is just a random example.

Not killing init provides enough for recovery if you truly hitan out of memory situation. With 2.4.x at least it is a boxmisconfiguration that causes it. The 2.2.x VM doesn't always tryto swap, and free things up hard enough, before reporting out ofmemory. But even the 2.2.x problems are rare.

swap < RAM. ouch! This is a misconfiguration on a machine thatactually starts swapping, and where out of memory problems are areality. The fact an installer would trigger swapping on a 256MBmachine is a second problem.

> Last month I had a computer algebra process running for a week.> Killed. But this computation was the only task this machine had.> Its sole reason of existence.> Too bad - zero information out of a week's computation.> (I think 2.4.0.)

It looks like you didn't have enough resources on that machineperiod. I pretty much trust 2.4.x in this department. Did thatmachine also have it's swap misconfigured?

> > Clearly, Linux cannot be reliable if any process can be killed> at any moment. I am not happy at all with my recent experiences.

Hmm. It should definitely not be at any moment. It should only bewhen resources are exhausted. So putting enough swap on a machineshould be enough, to stop this from ever happening.